A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 197: Chapter 197 — Eleven Names II

Friday came grey and dry.

The plaza outside Dublin Tower had been closed and swept since dawn. Eleven coffins stood in a single row on a raised platform, each draped in the tricolour, and before each one stood a small table bearing three things: a photograph, a Challenger badge, and something personal — a sword, a staff, a guild crest, and, seventh in the row, a tower shield with its rim polished bright.

Orla’s spear lay ninth, across two stands, with the Emerald Spire crest at its foot.

The families sat in the first rows, close enough to touch the platform. The nine survivors sat together to the side, in dress the Bureau had provided because none of them owned anything for this. Ronan and Cillian sat directly behind James, Finn, and Maeve, close enough that Cillian’s knee touched the back of James’s chair, which James suspected was on purpose. His mother sat at his other side.

Nyra was home. They’d talked it through the night before — the crowd, the cameras, the weight of the thing pressing down on a concealment that still broke for excited — and she had accepted it with bad grace and made him promise to describe it honestly. The media were far back, behind double barriers, long lenses only. The country watched through them.

O’Shea opened from a podium with no seal on it today.

”On Tuesday, this country did something no country had done, and there’ll be time to talk about that. Today isn’t it.” He looked out at the first rows, at the families. ”Today is for eleven people. I’d ask that anything you write or broadcast about this morning remember which of those two things it was for.”

He stepped down. Marcus took the podium.

He had one sheet of paper, and he read the names in the order they had stood at the gate briefing, and for each one he gave what the families had approved: name, rank, affiliation, years in the Tower.

”Aoife Brennan. B-rank. Emerald Spire. Four years of service.”

A breath.

”Tomás Whelan. A-rank. Independent registry. Nine years of service.”

He was steady for the first three. On the fourth, the pauses between sentences began to grow, a half-second at a time, and the paper in his hands developed a faint tremor at its bottom edge that the podium microphone couldn’t hear and the front rows could see. He gave the fifth name, and the sixth, and stopped to breathe between them where no punctuation asked him to.

”Declan O’Rourke. A-rank. Emerald Spire. Eleven years of service.”

Maeve’s head went down. She did it silently, chin to chest, and Cillian’s hand arrived on her shoulder from the row behind and stayed.

Two more names. Then—

”Orla Keane. A-rank. Emerald Spire. Seven years of service.”

Saoirse did not look down. She stared straight ahead at the ninth coffin with her spine perfectly straight, and she kept staring at it, unblinking, while the tenth name was read, and the eleventh, as if looking away were a form of leaving.

Marcus lowered the paper. By now his knuckles had gone white around it, and he folded it once, carefully, along a crease that already existed.

”Twenty entered under my command. Nine came home alive.” He looked at the row of coffins rather than the crowd. ”These are the eleven I failed to bring back.”

He left the podium before the plaza could decide whether to applaud, and it decided, correctly, not to.

The survivors went up in a loose line to the platform, each carrying flowers or something better than flowers.

Brady unclipped the Challenger badge from his own chest and laid it in front of the fifth coffin. Saoirse placed nothing at Orla’s; instead she straightened the spear on its stands by two millimeters, a correction only a spear fighter would ever have noticed, and stepped back.

James walked the row with his flowers and found he knew every photograph.

He had seen all eleven of these faces before, and not on the floor. In the return chamber. They had come back behind him, in two neat rows, on the same transport light that carried him home with his chest sealed and his HP restored to the last point. The System had rebuilt Marcus’s hand from nothing. It had wiped Redline’s damage out of Finn like a debt forgiven. It had reached James at zero and hauled him back across.

It had passed over these eleven and not slowed down.

He laid the flowers at the seventh table, beside the shield, and noticed that whoever had prepared it had polished the rim to a shine, and the strap was buckled wrong, high on the second notch, where Declan had never once worn it.

Finn stood at the end of the row for a moment when his turn was done, looking across the plaza to where Marcus stood alone near the platform steps, folded paper still in his hand. He looked at his father for a long few seconds.

Then he turned and walked back to the seats, and Marcus watched him go and made no move either, and whatever was broken between them stayed exactly where it was, in full view of both of them.

Maeve was last.

She stopped in front of the seventh coffin and put her hand flat on the shield, on the polished rim, and stood there, and her shoulders began to move in a rhythm that wasn’t quite breathing anymore, shorter and shorter, and her other hand came up and pressed over her mouth.

Cillian was beside her before anyone else had decided to move.

He didn’t touch her. He stood shoulder to shoulder and looked down at the shield with her, and after a moment he said, quietly, in the voice of a man citing a source:

”He’d complain they polished it wrong. He would. He’d want the maintenance log. ’Who signed off on this.’”

A sound came out of Maeve that was half wreckage and half laugh, ugly and alive, and her breathing came back down through it. She wiped her face once with the heel of her hand. Cillian stayed exactly where he was, saying nothing else, and walked her back to the seats when she was ready and not one second before.

James felt his mother’s hand slide into his.

He looked at her. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the eleven coffins, the eleven photographs, moving down the row of them one at a time, and her grip tightened as she went, and when she reached the end of the row her eyes stayed there, on the empty space after the eleventh table, and she held on to his hand with both of hers.

James looked at the empty space too, and understood exactly what she could see in it.

He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t be a promise he’d already refused to make. He put his other hand over hers and they sat like that until the piper finished.

Security moved the survivors out through the Tower-side exit, away from the barriers and the lenses, into a concrete service corridor that smelled of rain and diesel.

Ronan got ahead of James, Finn, and Maeve and then stopped, and turned, which in Ronan meant the exit was now closed.

”Right,” he said. ”I’ve left it a week. I watched the three of you sit through a debrief this morning saying words like a rehearsal, and I’ve just watched you bury eleven people, and I’m done pretending I can’t see it. Something happened on that floor beyond what’s in any report.”

”Not here.” Finn’s voice was flat and immediate. He glanced up the corridor, at the security detail holding the far door, at the vents. ”Not in a Bureau building, not in a car park, not within a mile of a microphone. Not here.”

”Then where?”

”Mine,” Finn said. ”Tomorrow.”

”His gaff’s a fortress,” Cillian added, to James and Maeve, in the tone of a man presenting brochure highlights. ”Guild-grade screening on every wall, since the fame got weird. No staff on weekends. And he’s got that ridiculous barbecue. We can be paranoid and fed.”

Maeve nodded. Finn nodded.

James didn’t, yet.

He stood in the corridor doing sums he’d been putting off for a week. Ronan and Cillian were team. They’d bled beside him for nineteen floors and they’d been left outside the gate for the twentieth through nothing but a roster cap, and they had stood behind his chair at a funeral today. They deserved the truth. And the truth had a dead god’s name in it, and a coin, and a throne room, and a slot in his interface with something patient and hateful inside it, and he did not yet know where the line sat between what they deserved and what was safe for them to be carrying around Dublin in their heads.

Ronan watched him do the sums. He was a Guardian; reading hesitation was his trade.

”You don’t have to tell us every secret you have,” Ronan said. ”But we’re a team. We need to know what happened to ours.”

The corridor hummed. Somewhere above them the plaza was still emptying, eleven families going home to houses with one coat too many on the hooks.

”Tomorrow,” James said. ”Finn’s house.”